Democratic Primaries 2020 - Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

We don’t and that’s the future. A robust set of rights for all workers and a safety net that provides for basic needs fully. Every employee can be their own union and just say ‘fuck it I quit’ if they don’t like the way they are being treated without worrying about starving to death as a result. You know… real leverage.

hokie · February 12, 2020, 2:34pm

We should do those things, but we probably need unions to keep those things.

Huehuecoyotl · February 12, 2020, 2:37pm

Yea you still need unions. They’re often a way to coordinate individual worker’s complaints/methods to improve in individual companies and within industries.

boredsocial · February 12, 2020, 2:37pm

I doubt this. Medicare and Social Security are extremely hard to fuck with because people already have them and get very angry if you fuck with them. UBI would be the same. All the other worker protections absolutely pale in comparison to UBI.

I say this as a professional negotiator: if you can’t walk away from the table it’s not a negotiation. The thing that would improve conditions for American workers the absolute most, especially at the bottom of the ladder, is leverage. Leverage lets you complain and have your boss take you seriously. Abusive bosses don’t do well with workforces who have significant leverage. Half the reason many ultra valuable employees are so well paid is to create a situation where their employer has leverage over them. You can’t force someone who makes normal money and can get normal money literally anywhere to work 60 hour hell weeks for years at a time. To do that with someone with real options you have to pay massive amounts of money to keep them in.

Riverman · February 12, 2020, 2:40pm

I’m admittedly biased, and this is probably a product of propaganda working, but basically all my personal experience with unions is the absolute worst members being protected at the expense of everyone else. In my town there was a teacher who told a black 3rd grader to “start acting like the white kids” because “you don’t see white kids acting up like you.” Not only not fired, school district pays for a “diversity awareness” person to basically follow her around for a year. GTFO. I’m fully aware unions are desperately needed in any kind of manual labor / service industry but the kind of scenario I described above turns off a lot of otherwise supportive types.

anon92450360 · February 12, 2020, 2:42pm

Yeah or basically any police union.

It’s very hard to write union bylaws in such a way that they don’t go hard to the paint for the awful members, without completely watering them down to the point that they actually protect no one.

microbet · February 12, 2020, 2:53pm

A good friend of mine has worked for a few unions and reports that they are not all the same. I forget which one, but a major union, she describes literally as a cult. Like they try to destroy you psychologically and isolate you from friends and family. But she thinks other unions are great.

olink · February 12, 2020, 2:55pm

Unions is how we got a minimum wage and what worker protections we do have in the first place. There is no world in which we (i.e. those who work for a living) have and maintain basic dignity without organising collective action regularly.

Unions are as vulnerable as any other organization to corruption and mismanagement, but not uniquely so. And if we get to a place where we have most of the socialism we want (living wage, healthcare, etc.) there will still always be a need for collective bargaining.

Huehuecoyotl · February 12, 2020, 3:02pm

Anything that involves a company, a worker, and customer service is going to be more complex because you’re having three parties being in close contact vs , say, an industrial union where the workers rarely come face to face with the customer. My dad’s in an industrial union and it’s been amazing. Comparatively the workers have much more power and say in their daily work schedule, their bosses rarely harass or bother them, they have good pay and benefits. I had a friend that was a in a teacher’s union and she had an alcohol problem and they sent her to rehab which I thought was cool for a job to do. It didn’t help in the end unfortunately. Of course from a parent’s point of view you wouldn’t want your kids to be around a teacher who was drinking at work.

boredsocial · February 12, 2020, 3:04pm

The way I see unions is this…

At first they are absolutely awesome. There’s usually a ton of abusive shit going on at the job which is why the union got in in the first place.

But then over time the Union becomes extremely powerful and they start abusing the employer. Suddenly workers aren’t allowed to do tasks that aren’t part of their job description, and raises are based not on merit but on seniority… and shitty people are protected to the point where they start abusing other Union members (read up on life inside Ford plants for female employees… it’s pretty dark) Productivity starts to fall and costs start to rise to the point where the profitability of the firm is questionable.

The union has already achieved everything in the wildest dreams of the original members of the union by this point. Pay is good and benefits are good.

Then the union fails miserably to get in with the firms competitors workforce’s (a great example of this is the UAW failing miserably to unionize any of the foreign car plants in the US basically) while continuing to turn the screws on the firm.

Eventually the firm goes bankrupt and the Union is forced to negotiate. The Union, whose leadership is made up of senior employees defend their own pay/benefits but allow new employees to get fucked over (examples include the auto industry and pro sports where every single new contract is basically a competition to see how hard you can make the rookies take one in the shorts since they basically have zero representation in the Union). Now you have a business with two tiers of employees who get treated vastly differently.

Basically power begets privilege. The people in this country who desperately need a Union are retail workers, restaurant workers, and call center workers. Nearly none of them are unionized. The people who do have unions are mostly in occupations that now confer a significant amount of pure privilege. Often the actions of those Unions cause significant harm to the non unionized second class workers at the bottom. A great example would be when the LA port strike put tens of thousands of truck drivers out of work for weeks in 2014 without pay. The longshoremen had the global economy by the balls and they used it to extort the entire economy. They won ldo. Everyone else including me lost.

So yeah unions serve and important purpose in that they get working people a better deal. But I’d argue that 90%+ of their total positive impact is felt in the first MAYBE 10 years of existence and after that they, like all other people with power, turn into rent seekers. It is what it is. It’s a humanity problem more than anything IMO.

anachronistic · February 12, 2020, 3:06pm

Isn’t Culinary 229 that union that’s ratfucking Bernie? Assuming that’s restaurant workers.